While the bestseller lists usually contain one or more conservative books providing a survey of what is wrong with liberal thought or how liberals are undermining America, this book deserves to be set apart and taken much more seriously. Rather than a glib survey of the popular scene with sharp barbs tossed at the usual suspects, Mona Charen provides us with six powerful essays. She is a former White House speechwriter, and her gift for fashioning vibrant and passionate prose in the service of a well constructed argument shows in every page of this book.

These essays take on liberal articles of faith and leftist bureaucratic groupthink. Mrs. Charen demonstrates how the culture of non-judgment and soft punishment is connected to the great increase in crime for the past several decades. She shows how blind the establishment has been to why Giuliani's policies in governing New York actually had an impact.

She also illuminates how the race relations industry stifles progress and demagogues the issue of race in our country. Her discussion of the predictable (and predicted) debilitating influence the creation of "entitlements" has had on our country. To the point that one Supreme Court justice actually compared the entitlement of welfare to a medical license or a license to practice law. It is as if all jobs were sinecures and it was up to the government to allocate them according to their whim. You will just shake your head when see the foolishness of these policies laid out in this essay.

Of course, more than one person predicted that these policies along with other changes in our culture would lead to fewer strong families and the cost this would have on children. Many bought into the notion that if the adults were happier divorced then the children would be happier. Those that said this was lunacy were shouted down. Nowadays, it is clear that government policies have made a powerful contribution to weakening families and harming children. Again, read what Mrs. Charen says and you will learn how this has been a decades long fiasco.

The author also does a fabulous job in demonstrating how the homelessness crisis was a pure creation of the left on the one hand emptying the mental hospitals directly onto the streets and then misrepresenting both the mix of who was actually homeless and how many of them there were. Under Reagan and the first Bush there were gillions of them. Under Clinton, none. Under Bush II we are back to at least a kajillion. Ho, ho, ho.

No one is taking lightly those truly in need and we all should help out local programs at our churches and homeless shelters and the Salvation Army to get food and shelter to all in need. The point here is the naked politics of the reporting on this issue.

The last essay is on the tragic destruction of our public schools over the past several decades. The growth of the education bureaucracy has taken needed resources away from the classroom. The establishment cries for more money even when we spend hundreds of billions of dollars and keep increasing the amounts tossed into that sink hole. Yet what our students actually know shrinks - but they feel really proud of themselves and are experts on popular culture.

If you are going to get just one book on important current issues I would recommend that you give this book serious consideration. Strongly Recommended.